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Police in Salt Lake City in the United States shot and seriously injured an autistic boy whose mother had called 911 for help when her 13-year-old son began screaming in mental anguish.
Linden Cameron suffered from separation anxiety, her mother Golda Barton told reporters, and reacted angrily when she had to return to work for the first time in nearly a year.
He called 911 for help from police officers to get the boy to the hospital.
“I told them, ‘Look, he’s unarmed, he doesn’t have anything, he just gets mad and starts screaming and yelling. He’s a boy, he’s trying to get attention,'” he told local KUTV station.
When the teenager began to flee from the police, one of the officers opened fire and wounded the boy, who is white, with shots in the shoulder, intestine, bladder and ankle.
“During a chase on foot, an officer fired his firearm and struck the subject,” police spokesman Keith Horrocks told reporters.
“Faced with threats from a weapon, they came to the area and contacted this man, that man fled on foot,” Horrocks said.
“He’s a little boy, why don’t you attack him?” his mother said.
According to Horrocks, the boy was suspected of having “threatened some people with a gun.”
But he admitted that so far no weapon had been found at the scene of the police shooting.
In a country mired in protest and division over a series of police killings, the Utah incident sparked a strong backlash among local disability advocacy groups.
“Police were called in because help was needed, but instead more damage was done,” Neurodiverse Utah said in a statement.
The case echoed the death of Daniel Prude, a mentally ill black man whose brother called 911 for help when the 41-year-old was having a psychological breakdown.
Prude died of suffocation after police covered his head with a hood and pinned him to the ground in Rochester, New York, in March.
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